Microsoft has a long history of confusing customers with multiple pricing models and several different agreement types. With Cloud services, some of that has been simplified on the surface, but still leaves customers typically paying more (not less) over time. Microsoft really is not in business to help their customers spend less on Microsoft, but we are. In that spirit, as many of you already know, Microsoft announced new global price increases set to go into effect March 1, 2022. In addition to the 365 increases, there are other important changes coming to their CSP (Cloud Solution Provider) partner programs that could also impact your ...
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Every IT leader reading this now is overspending 30% to 60% on at least one of their strategic suppliers. Unfortunately, many are overspending on several. How can we know this with such confidence? We’ve been seeing it now since 2002 and it’s the very reason we are thriving today. There are several factors that enable this culture of overspend to get traction inside organizations. Much of it is built on the good intentions of IT buyers simply working to execute their business plans with limited resources. Exacerbating the problem however, are the technology goliaths and their downstream ecosystems, who spend vast sums of money to ensure ...
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Supplier lock-in has been a major issue with savvy decision makers for many years, and with good reason. Allowing your company to be overly subjugated to a specific supplier (often with little control of the situation) often turns into a monopolistic relationship. The script gets flipped and rather than exercising your buyer power, you become the passive party, beholden to any changes in terms and conditions having little power to stop it. Unfortunately, with the exodus from data centers to the cloud, companies are now finding themselves being locked-in to AWS, Azure or Google with their increased need for cloud flexibility and scalability ...
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Cloud spend is anticipated to continue its massive growth trajectory for the foreseeable future. However, the spend does not have to match that same growth curve! To help our Clients maintain sound Cloud Optimization programs, we've assembled a series of articles and tips called: 12 for '21 Cloud Optimization Series (note: request a download of all 12 here). Our eighth chapter in the series: Elastic IPs Elastic IPs (‘EIPs’) An Elastic IP is static and is assigned to a given instance regardless of the instance's state. The “elasticity” of the IP address enables you to stop EC2 instances and transfer the IP address to another EC2 instance—or ...
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Oracle Rewards! Oracle recently launched a new program selling ocean-front property in Arkansas. Bonus! North of the Arctic Circle in Alaska, they also have land available for purchase. Rewards and Credits! The deal is that for every acre you buy in Alaska, you get a credit toward your Arkansas property! Sounds like a good deal, right? Except however, when you fully understand that Arkansas is not on the ocean, and you have zero need for land in Alaska (no offense meant to Alaskans). Yes, they are not really selling land, but in classic Oracle fashion, they have put together a ‘rewards’ program that purports to lower your support costs but ...
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Cloud spend is anticipated to continue its massive growth trajectory for the foreseeable future. However, the spend does not have to match that same growth curve! To help our Clients maintain sound Cloud Optimization programs, we've assembled a series of articles and tips called: 12 for '21 Cloud Optimization Series (note: request a download of all 12 here). Our seventh chapter in the series: Use Spot Pricing Spot Instances are spare compute capacity at a steep discount (up to 90%) to On-Demand Instances. Spot Instances can go down with very little notice. While they are frequently used to supplement On-Demand Instances, they aren’t meant to ...
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Cloud spend is anticipated to continue its massive growth trajectory for the foreseeable future. However, the spend does not have to match that same growth curve! To help our Clients maintain sound Cloud Optimization programs, we've assembled a series of articles and tips called: 12 for '21 Cloud Optimization Series (note: request a download of all 12 here). Our sixth chapter in the series: CloudWatch with Autoscaling AWS CloudWatch (Azure Monitor, GCP Monitoring) enables you to collect consumption metrics and set up alarms to invoke actions. These tools collect these metrics, allows you to visualize them and to define alarms with the ...
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Cloud spend is anticipated to continue its massive growth trajectory for the foreseeable future. However, the spend does not have to match that same growth curve! To help our Clients maintain sound Cloud Optimization programs, we've assembled a series of articles and tips called: 12 for '21 Cloud Optimization Series (note: request a download of all 12 here). Our fifth chapter in the series: Size it Right! Once you have deployed resources for a while, you have to check that your instances are optimal. For most clients, instances are set with the right configuration at time of the launch. As your consumption and business environment evolve, ...
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Cloud spend is anticipated to continue its massive growth trajectory for the foreseeable future. However, the spend does not have to match that same growth curve! To help our Clients maintain sound Cloud Optimization programs, we've assembled a series of articles and tips called: 12 for '21 Cloud Optimization Series (note: request a download of all 21 here). Today we review the fourth installment in the series: Power-Cycle It. A large portion of the cloud waste originates from idle and low utilization instances. This is particularly relevant for non-production (e.g. development, testing, QA, etc.) instances and applications with consumption ...
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Cloud spend is anticipated to continue its massive growth trajectory for the foreseeable future. However, the spend does not have to match that same growth curve! To help our Clients maintain sound Cloud Optimization programs, we've assembled a series of articles and tips called: 12 for '21 Cloud Optimization Series (note: request a download of all 21 here). Today we review the third installment in the series: Demand Management. It is critical that workloads and their consumption profile match with the appropriate cloud infrastructure. Most of the cloud waste originates from a lack of consistent, dynamic governance. With few clicks, any ...
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